Archbishop Nourhan Manougian, 65, the new elected Armenian patriarch of Jerusalem, speaks at the Armenian church in Jerusalem's old city on January 24 2013. Archbishop Nurhan Manougian has been elected the 97th Armenian Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem, one of the five custodians of Christian religious sites in the Holy Land, sources told AFP on Thursday.

AFP - Archbishop Nurhan Manougian has been elected the 97th Armenian Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem, one of the five custodians of Christian religious sites in the Holy Land, sources told AFP on Thursday.Manougian, 65, replaces Torkom Manougian, who died aged 93 in October 2012, after falling into a coma following a stroke.The new patriarch will lead the small Armenian Orthodox communities in Israel, the Palestinian territories and Jordan, as well as take responsibility for parts of holy sites including the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.He was elected with 17 votes in his favour to 15 votes for Archbishop Aris Shirvanian, who had been serving as interim patriarch, a source in the Armenian community said.Nurhan Manougian was born in Aleppo, Syria in 1948 and ordained in Jerusalem in 1971. His election must be approved by Israel and the Jordanian king.There are an estimated 2,000 Armenians living in Jerusalem today, down from an estimated 16,000 in 1948 when the state of Israel was created.

This is ironic but not funny. Speaking of Vanetsi, see where the said Yeghisheh was born.As mentioned below, there was a bitter contest between him and the Aleppo born Abp. Tiran Nersoyan . Yeghisheh won, mostly because, in addition to the below, in addition him (a celibate?) having fathered several illegitimate children, he was a pimp for the Jordanian palace's drunken orgies. At the time his most vociferous campaigners were his “concubines”. That was the most scandalous era of the Jerusalem Patrirachate. We are not speaking of his pilferage of the Church treasures, when his loot were auctioned in many places. Then came Abp. Torgom who cleaned the “house garbage” to his best ability.Read the rest here;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeghishe_Derderian_of_Jerusalem

Yeghishe Derderian was born in Van, then the Ottoman Empire, now Turkey, in 1910. He lost all of his relatives in 1915, during the Armenian genocide. In 1922, he came to Jerusalem at the age of 12, to study at the St. James Theological Seminary. He served eventually as the dean of the seminary, before being named deputy patriarch of Jerusalem upon the death of in Patriarch Guregh Israeli (1944–1949). The position of Patriarch of Jerusalem remained vacant from 1949 to 1957 and 1958 to 1960, with a brief period from 1957 to 1958, when Tiran Nersoyan was elected Patriarch, but not consecrated….